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from David Ruccio Regular readers know I take statistics quite seriously. So, as it turns out, did Stephen Jay Gould who, in the most poignant story about statistics of which I am aware, explained how important it is to go beyond the abstractions of central tendencies and understand the distribution of variation within the numbers. And right now, when the numbers are under attack—when, for example, the new Trump administration is threatening to purge the inconvenient numbers about climate...

Better than expected. Lots of seasonality to January numbers. For example, warm weather that adds a few construction jobs gets magnified, and due to light temporary help hiring during the holiday season there were fewer workers to layoff in January, giving a boost to temporary help type measures. Meanwhile, however, the deceleration trend in the year over year chart continues, and wage growth remains subdued and last month’s downward revision indicated prior concerns were...

from Lars Syll Eminent statistician David Salsburg is rightfully very critical of the way social scientists — including economists and econometricians — uncritically and without arguments have come to simply assume that one can apply probability distributions from statistical theory on their own area of research: We assume there is an abstract space of elementary things called ‘events’ … If a measure on the abstract space of events fulfills certain axioms, then it is a probability. To use...

I just finished Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg. Richburg spent three years in Africa while working for the Washington Post, and his tenure overlapped with the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, among other atrocities and outrages. Richburg is not a particularly good wordsmith, but he is unflinching and that makes this book transcend. He tells it like he sees it, and varnishes nothing. Well, almost...

It will be a while before even the discussions begin: House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that Republican lawmakers will try to push through tax reform and infrastructure bills — two key policies for investors — in the spring after focusing on health care. “It’s just the way the budget works that we won’t be able to get the ability to write our tax reform bill until our spring budget passes, and then we write that through the summer,” Ryan said on “Fox and Friends.” He...

from Peter Radford One of the greatest shifts in our economy over the past few decades has been the steady rise of what we call contingent workers. These are people who make their livings on a part-time or contractual basis and have no full-time job. In the US the increase in contingent workers accounted for all the increase in jobs between 2005 and 2015. Whilst  there was an increase in full-time jobs during that period that increase was more than offset by a simultaneous elimination of...

More weak hard data: Highlights Chain stores are reporting mostly lower sales rates in January than December, in line with Redbook data and hinting at possible trouble for the ex-auto ex-gas reading of the January retail sales report. Looking at the total retail sales report, unit auto sales proved very soft compared to December (data released yesterday) though gasoline stations likely got a January lift from a moderate increase in prices. Yet gasoline makes up only a small...

Update: after writing this post I discovered that today Matthew Klein wrote a much longer and much more in depth article about the same subject here. Same conclusion. Should we start a trade war? Let’s, before doing this, take a closer look at current accounts: higher current account surpluses or smaller deficits are not necessarily associated with higher employment. To the contrary. Two examples: between 2009 and 2016 the monthly Eurozone Current Account changed from about minus 10...

Same story- survey expectations elevated while hard data continues to soften: Based on a preliminary estimate from WardsAuto, light vehicle sales were at a 17.47 million SAAR in January. That is up about 2% from January 2016, and down 4.5% from the 18.29 million annual sales rate last month.Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/#qWEO2cMQ2CSiDhiS.99 Highlights Construction spending fell 0.2 percent in December but details show welcome gains for housing. Spending on...